Over the course of Saturday, Senators Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal, along with X CEO Linda Yaccarino, made the announcements of the adjustments.
On Saturday, Senators Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn made an announcement that they had made modifications to the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) with the assistance of X. The purpose of these modifications was to "strengthen the bill while safeguarding free speech online and ensuring that it is not used to stifle expression." The law was approved by the Senate in July with a vote of 91-3; however, it has since been stuck in the House of Representatives, and those who support it are working hard to have it enacted before the end of the year goes by. The Chief Executive Officer of X, Linda Yaccarino, also wrote about the collaboration and urged both the House of Representatives and Congress to approve the law.
"After working with the bill authors, I'm proud to share that we've made progress to further protect freedom of speech while maintaining safety for minors online," Yaccarino wrote in a post on X that was shared by the two senators. "It's a significant accomplishment for us to have made such progress." The purpose of the KOSA is to safeguard children from potentially harmful information and "addictive" elements of social media platforms by imposing a "duty of care" on the businesses that run these platforms. However, there are many who believe that it could result in censorship and other negative consequences. It has been said by The Verge that the new modifications make the parameters under which duty of care can be enforced more clear. Additionally, the application of duty of care is restricted to anxiety and depressive illnesses, indicating that these symptoms must be "objectively verifiable" and linked to "compulsive usage."
Blumenthal (Democrat of Connecticut) and Blackburn (Republican of Tennessee) said the following in their joint statement:
As a result of these modifications, the false narrative that this measure will be weaponized by unelected bureaucrats in order to restrict Americans should be eradicated immediately and completely. Elon and Linda deserve our gratitude for their courageous leadership and unwavering dedication to safeguarding children's online safety, as well as for their assistance in bringing this law to a successful conclusion during this Congress. The fact that their support and altered phrasing reflects their publicly stated purpose of advancing free speech without fear of censorship is something that we are grateful for. We would like to restate X's appeal for the passage of KOSA by the end of the year; it is abundantly evident that this piece of legislation has the support of Congress in overwhelming numbers.
Since its initial introduction in February 2022, KOSA has been met with criticism from a variety of organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. There have been numerous rounds of revisions.
